After Blue
Entry updated 14 January 2024. Tagged: Film.
French film (2021); original title After blue (Paradis sale). Ecce Films / Ha Ma Productions. Written and directed by Bertrand Mandico. Cast includes Agata Buzek, Elina Lowensohn, Paula Luna and Vimala Pons. 129 minutes. Colour.
"To be incoherent means to have faith in cinema, it means to have a romantic approach, unformatted, free, disturbed and dreamlike, cinegenic, an epic narration." So reads part of the Incoherence Manifesto co-written by French director Mandico. It could also be a summation of this ultra-kitsch, undisciplined, often imaginative, often exhausting film. The planet After Blue is entirely populated by female colonists escaping Earth (see Colonization of Other Worlds), after all the men and boys are killed by a Pandemic disease causing hair to grow into their body. In a strictly regulated society, young outsider Roxy frees the notorious outlaw Kate Bush from a sand trap. To avoid banishment, she and her mother are ordered to track down the killer. So begins a picaresque-style Planetary-Romance journey across the world, with encounters with bounty hunters, a renegade artist and a male-fashioned Android, as well as the ghosts that are haunting Roxy.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, plot takes a back seat to visual stylization. Almost the entire film takes place in an atmosphere of reds and purples, with many a swirling mist. The resemblance to a 1980s music video is unlikely to be accidental (the retro synth score by Pierre Desprats adds to this ambience); neither is the mix of Western-style adventure and 1970s exploitation movie elements, with cheerfully cheap rubber tentacles on the android, low-grade Weaponry and plentiful though discreet nudity. But interesting themes emerge: the mother-daughter relationship is enjoyably fractious, and the growing bond between hunter and hunted (with the boundaries of each role becoming blurred) is born out of their shared outsider status. [CWa]
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